Alex Leach
Alex Leach is a singer, guitarist and banjo player from East Tennessee who has been a Clinch Mountain Boy with Ralph Stanley II in two stretches, from 2012 to 2019 and again from 2024, and in between led the Alex Leach Band. He has been a bluegrass DJ on WDVX in Knoxville since he was nine, and he co-wrote “Mountain Heartache.”
WDVX hired him as a DJ when he was nine years old, already well versed in traditional bluegrass records, and the story of the young radio host was told by CMT, ABC News and the BBC. Before he turned 15 he had twice been named DJ of the Year by the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music of America. He learned every instrument in the bluegrass band, guitar and banjo above all, and began his professional career at 19, when Larry Gillis hired him. With Gillis’s bass player, Rafe Waters, he wrote “Mountain Heartache.”
From Gillis’s band he went on the road with Ralph Stanley II, joining the Clinch Mountain Boys on banjo in 2012, and in 2014 he played banjo with them on the Grand Ole Opry. After Ralph II took over the Clinch Mountain Boys name, the band’s first record under it, released by Stanley Family Records on 26 May 2017, had John Rigsby on fiddle and mandolin, Leach on banjo, Randall Hibbitts on bass and Ralph II on guitar. In May 2018 Leach released a solo CD, Why Sure It Is!, which closes with “Mountain Heartache.”
In May 2019 he announced that he would leave the Clinch Mountain Boys at the end of that summer, after about seven years, to start his own group, in which he played guitar and sang lead. He and his wife, the singer Miranda Jo Leach, launched the Alex Leach Band in late 2019, and it played an invited showcase at the IBMA’s World of Bluegrass in Raleigh that fall. Its first full-length album, I’m the Happiest When I’m Moving, came out on Mountain Home Music Company in March 2021, with J. T. Coleman on bass, Joshua Gooding on mandolin and Brandon Masur on banjo, John Rigsby guesting on fiddle, and “Take Me Back,” which Alex wrote and sang with Miranda. All the Way, produced by Jon Weisberger, followed on Mountain Home in August 2022, with Coleman throughout and guests including Derek Vaden, Chris Sexton, Bryan McDowell and Carley Arrowood. In September 2023 he released the single “Summer Haven,” written with Miranda and recorded at Pinnacle Studio in Campbell County, Tennessee, with Baker Northern on banjo, Zach Russell on mandolin, Kasey Moore on fiddle and Coleman on bass.
At the start of 2024 he had signed on as project coordinator for The Crooked Road, kept up his WDVX shows and committed to dates with the young East Tennessee mandolinist Wyatt Ellis. When the banjo player Landon Fitzpatrick left Ralph Stanley II in February 2024, Leach filled in for a few shows and then rejoined the band full time. On 17 January 2025 he played guitar when Ralph II led the Clinch Mountain Boys on the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium, with Curtis Coleman on banjo, Stanley Efaw on fiddle, Hibbitts on bass and Ellis as a guest on mandolin. That May he played guitar and sang harmony on Ellis’s first single as a singer and band leader, the Stanley Brothers’ “Choo Choo Coming.” On the Clinch Mountain Boys’ album Rollin’ On Rubber Wheels, reviewed in September 2025, he sings and plays guitar alongside Ralph II.
